What is a common denominator for startups like Uber, Dropbox and Whastapp?

Thank you. Fantastic to be back in Copenhagen. What's up Copenhagen? Everybody feeling warm? So it's also good because finally somebody understands my English. It's been eight years in America without anybody understanding my Danish accent. So I made it back here in this summer, in August, and had a little bit of time to think about life. And one of the things I was thinking about was like why was it that Uber was able, this little app on the icon, like an icon that didn't even exist just a few years ago, how were they able to fight like a whole industry, globally? China, everything globally. How is that possible? How come, why was Dropbox able to do that? Why was Uber able to launch much later than everybody else and still build a huge company? And why was Jan at WhatsApp able to sell his company, he was 40 people, to Facebook for 19 billion dollars? And I came to a big realization and it was that they came down to a common sort of denominator. They had something in common. They had four things in common. And this is something I wanted to share here. Because I think we can all think about that in the ventures that we do, whether that applies to the stuff that we're doing. The first one is the team. And all three companies had incredible execution and they were obsessed with the culture. Even from a small, from the beginning. So you can think, if you just started off your company, why should I think about culture now with three people? That's actually where it starts. The second thing was the product. So another point that they were obsessed with was the simplicity. The simplicity of the user experience, which we probably all know that. And then there was this growth currency that they had all built into it, which we can think about when we build products to explode. How can they pick up this organic growth fuel? How can we incentivize users to tell other people about it and everybody, both sides of the equation, be rewarded for it? That this growth fuel. And you can build that in as a mechanic when you start to think about the product. And the third thing was monetization. They were all dealing in areas that had huge monetization potential. And of course, what's happened? One end of the scale, they were just going for growth. They said, we're just going to gun for growth as much as possible, as quickly as possible. And then we figure out everything else afterwards. And at the other end of the scale, it was Uber, which said, hey, you know what? People that used to pay for a crappy service, but they're willing to pay for this. So that's the other end of the scale. And then they just built a much better experience that people, of course, were even more willing to pay for. And then you have Dropbox in the middle, which is a freemium service. It's sort of like a mix of the two, which was very deliberate. They said, hey, let's get 400 million users on the platform. And then once people go to work, they want to use Dropbox as well. And they want to use it with different metrics, different parameters, security, all of this stuff. And they will pay a lot for it. So that's the third sort of thing. That's the sort of common denominator across these three companies that I saw. And the fourth one is timing. I mean, it's very hard to get it right. But when you get it right, it's just explosive, right? And I want to share a couple of experiences that I've had where we got the timing completely wrong, and it was catastrophic. So a little bit about my journey. This is super weird. But I'm Danish Portuguese. Don't ask me why. And I have three kids. Two kids are American, and one little kid is English. And this becomes relevant later sort of in the story. But have you ever had the feeling where you go to a place, you go to an office, or you go to a school, or you go to like a community or something, and you say, what? I really want to be part of this. I can really picture myself be part of this, just like what we're experiencing right now. And that's how I felt. That's how I felt when I went to England. And I saw the college there. I said, you know what? I really want to be part of this. I feel good there. I feel my element. And that's the sort of instinct that you have to hold on to when you feel that, and then you just go with it. It's a fantastic feeling. And that's what I did, and that's how I went to Voice Signal when it was a small company. It's the series service in the Apple phones today. And it was voice recognition. And very quickly we got acquired by Nuance in the U.S. And then I sort of got the appetite for the U.S. I said, you know what? I really want to go to the U.S. That's my dream. That's what I feel I want to be there. I want to be part of it. So I was super lucky. I got through meeting people at the right time. All of a sudden I said, Lars, you know something about mobile? You should come and help us grow mobile. I said, fantastic. So it took me about a year to get a visa. Big pain. And something there were a lot of lessons with that as well when people think about going to the U.S., the visa process and so on. I finally got over that. Just imagine this scenario. You're like, yes, this is part of your dream. You've reached this huge milestone that you dreamt of. You show up to work first time. I brought my wife and I have one little kid at the time only. You show up to work and they're like, Lars, I'm really sorry. We're out of money. I'm like, wow, great. So then I thought, well, you know what? I'm not going to go back. I've said goodbye to everybody back home. I'm going to stay here. So I went to Skyhook Wireless. And this was a company that Steve Jobs had just spoken about on stage. This was the Wi-Fi triangulation, like indoor location basically. And I joined them. And I thought, yes, I have my second chance here. I'm going to make it now. I have a chance. Two years later, they fell out with Google. Massive lawsuit. And they shut all the business down so I was without a job again. I'm like, you're kidding me. And not only that, then I got a letter from the U.S. state, like USCIS, to be very exact, saying, Lars, we'd like to have you back. We'd like to invite you out of the country. So I was like, yeah, right. And to my luck, my wife was pregnant there with the first little American product. And I used that as an excuse. Sorry, I can't leave the country. And actually it was the best thing that happened to me because that's how I came across Dropbox. I was like, great, third time lucky. And the first time I met Drew at Dropbox, I mean, he thought I was from Mars. He thought, like, who is this guy talking about mobile? Talking about big deals with the Koreans and with the guys from Finland? Like, what is he talking about? And we were sitting in this room. Just imagine this. We were sitting, like, in a back room. It was like where all the brooms. It was sort of like the cleaning room. Two dustbins, like, turned upside down and we were just going through this. And I had my deck. I was pitching him and all this stuff. He had no idea what to do with this. He's like, Lars, welcome aboard. We're going to have a crazy time. And we did have a crazy time. And fast forward about four weeks. Fast forward about four years. And we had grown from we were about 20 people when I joined. We had, you know, four years later, as much, we're about, you know, 300 million users, something like that. I mean, it had just been this explosive growth. And I started to advise WhatsApp through networking, through events like this. And you just meet people. You get in. You're sort of, like, very open and help people and so on. And, you know, I started advising WhatsApp. A week later, they got acquired by me. Well, a week later after we had sort of discussed me joining them full time, they got acquired by Facebook. So that was bad luck, I would say. And I went to Uber right after that. And the way that happened was, you know, when I met Travis, Travis came up, gave me a big hug and said, Lars, we're going to, like, welcome to this rocket ship. And that's what it is. I mean, they just hit one billion rides here a couple of weeks ago. And they just absolutely, absolutely exploded. And I think, like, my lesson that I'd like to share here is just, like, the power of networking, the power of coming here at minus 16, whatever it is, and just meeting people and stay here until the end. Just meet people and be open-minded and help each other because it's going to bring something along, like, two years later when you least expect it. Somebody that you met, yeah, you know, that was right. It was a good introduction you made there, whatever. You just never know how things may turn out. But the power of networking is very significant. And then I, as I mentioned, I thought, well, you know what? I have three little kids now. It's time to go back to Europe. And I thought, how can I sort of come and help the community that I come from with some of the lessons that I made in the Valley? And this is where I joined Boulderton, which is a VC based in London. We do a lot of work in Europe and super happy to be involved with Denmark, obviously. And coming back to Europe has been incredible. And I mean, let's be honest. A couple of years ago, it would have been impossible to get a group of people together like we are here unless you would have like Shubhidu on stage or something like that. I mean, incredible, right? But this is very normal in the Valley that you just get a lot of people together and you sort of see what comes out of it. It sort of takes on this organic life. And it becomes something bigger than the master. It's a lot of the people and so on. Very, very exciting. And this has all got to do with sort of this change in mentality that's happened. It's like a change. It's a cultural shift. It's cool to be an entrepreneur now. It's rewarding to be an entrepreneur, to work, as some of the speakers said earlier, to work with something that you're super passionate about and excited about. It becomes your life mission to do HR software. It doesn't matter. It's something that adds on to life. It's the value of what we're all doing. And the other thing I would say is this is amazing. It is that, I mean, just even tonight I met a couple of people who've been in the Valley. They've had their big companies over there. They return here. They start to invest in sort of angel investments, which means it's more incentivized for people to start up. There's less, a little bit less risk because suddenly you get some money in. And you can do it. You can afford to do it. You can afford to have like that first hundred grand, whatever it is, to kick something in. And that's amazing because then that starts to really feed the system. And that's another thing that's happened. And that's going to happen a lot, lot more as people, they, you know, they are successful. And, of course, this shows in the numbers as well. I'm not going to dig into this. But the most important is that we have people to look up to, that we all have people to look up to. We have people to aspire to who've gone through the journey. Like, you know, we can mention so many companies from every country in Europe now. So many founders in every country in Europe now that have gone through this journey. I mean, that's impressive. It is something we all can aspire to, really. And the same thing happens with the companies. So then you start to get derivatives of companies. So you start, you know, the folks who were earlier at Spotify, they start to start up other companies. And they start to start up other companies, et cetera, et cetera. And this is starting in every region of Europe as well. So we're starting to get derivatives of the successes we're making. Which is fantastic. Again, it's a lot more powerful. It's almost like it's a platform play then, right? And, you know, the Vino guys, again, shout out to them as more locally as well as examples. And we have examples of these successes everywhere. So quick lessons learned that I wanted to share. If I wanted to sort of tell myself, you know, eight years back some of the things to think about, one of them is just like think about your health. I mean, yes. It's a life mission. And you will put everything into this. But quite honestly, this is maybe very personal. But I wouldn't do it at any cost. And one of the costs is health. And this is very easy to say when you look back and you say, hey, I wish I could have done something different. But really, I truly believe that. Honestly, it's not at any cost. And health is sort of like a very basic thing that just has to be in order. And the other thing. The other thing is the culture piece. Like be obsessed with culture. Really be obsessed with culture. It doesn't matter what stage the company is at, how many people are at the company. Like really be obsessed with it. And be very thoughtful about creating it the way that you had envisioned it and the way that will generate this sort of like execution culture. And it's a topic that I'm very passionate about. I love to talk to people about it. But this is the other one. The culture really, really matters. And the third one is like trust your instincts. It's one of these, another sort of like nebulous thing. But in decision-making and hiring people, that was mentioned a little bit earlier, trust the instinct that you have when you hire, when you make some product decisions. describe that you can't write on a piece of paper something is that that really brings things to a whole new level and then the fourth one is is be you know what i would say is be obsessed with with invention so make sure to be in a space where you can really think about doing things in a different way about inventing processes like doing products in a different way hiring in a different way thinking about how you finance your company in a different way thinking about how you structure the the stock options for employees in a different way just like bring like build on top of what other people have have built this is something that i've that i've been very inspired by like it's okay to build on top of other people's stuff it's that's it's their contribution that somebody else is building on top of them and then somebody else will build on top of them and this is how we bring everything up right so being in that space and creating a physical space as well where you can be innovative is super important and then the final one time's out i mean this is the one where um you know we are we should all be obsessed with really winning and be i would almost say paranoid with somebody else thinking about the same idea having the same company in some other market and thinking better about it and working just as hard as you so i mean take a moment to look around look around you so i mean take a moment to look around look you look at the look at the person who's next to you just here in this room take a look at the person next to you the person around you i can guarantee someone in this room is building the next billion dollar idea absolutely guarantee it's a question of time and this is it you know so this is the investment that we do in the community helping each other. And with that, I want to say, here's for Danish Dynamite. Thank you very much, everybody.